VII. Rewrite the sentences using a phrase from the list below.

[ It’s high time  •  They would sooner have  •  I would rather  •  We would just as soon  •  You would be better off  •  You had better  •  Imagine you had ]

1. Buying a desktop computer would be preferable for them but their son wanted a laptop.

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________
2. Please don’t leave your games console on all night; it’s a terrible waste of electricity.

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

3. It would have helped had you given what you wanted to do at university more thought while you were applying for courses.

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

4. If you had accepted the internship, what options would it have offered you professionally?

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

5. Working while you are still studying would be better than searching for experience later.

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

6. Everyone would prefer to take the train to college together.

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

7. Paul really needs to be more responsible; I’m fed up with his reckless behaviour!

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

8. You need to type up this report or you will get in trouble.

⟶ ______________________________________________________________________________________________

Read a magazine article about an intellectual process known as critical thinking. For questions 1 – 6, choose the answer (A, B, C, or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Critical Thinking

We examine whether people are still able to engage in critical thinking in modern day society

Critical, or analytical, thinking is a way of interacting with what we read or listen to in attempt to have a deeper understanding. “There is a belief that argument is a way of finding the truth,” observes Adrian West, research director at the Edward de Bono Foundation U.K.

Although there’s little debate that information technology complements – and often enhances – the human mind in the quest to store information and process an ever-growing tangle of bits and bytes, there’s increasing concern that the same technology is changing the way we approach complex problems, and making it more difficult to really think. “We’re exposed to greater amounts of poor yet charismatic thinking, the fads of intellectual fashion, opinion, and mere assertion,” says West. “The wealth of communications and information can easily overwhelm our reasoning abilities.” What’s more, it’s ironic that ever-growing piles of data and information do not equate to greater knowledge and better decision-making. What’s remarkable, West says, is just “how little this has affected the quality of our thinking.”

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, literary reading, for one thing, declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Many, including Patricia Greenfield, a professor of psychology, believe that a greater focus on visual media comes at a price. “A drop-off in reading has possibly contributed to a decline in critical thinking,” she says. “There is a greater emphasis on real-time media and multi-tasking rather than focusing on a single thing.” Nevertheless, a definitive answer about how technology affects critical thinking is not yet available. Instead, due to the ever greater presence of technology, critical thinking has landed in a mushy swamp and academics can no longer rely on fundamental beliefs that they previously held.

While it’s tempting to view computers, video games, and the internet in a largely good or bad way, the reality is that they may be both, with different technologies, systems and uses yielding entirely different results. For example, a video game may promote critical thinking or detract from it. Reading on the internet may ratchet up one’s ability to analyze while chasing an endless array of hyperlinks may inhibit deeper thought.

“Exposure to technology fundamentally changes the way people think,” says Greenfield. As visual media have exploded, noticeable changes have resulted. “Reading enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media do not,” Greenfield explains. “It develops imagination, induction, reflection, and critical thinking, and vocabulary.” However, she has found that visual media actually improve some types of information processing. Unfortunately, “most visual media are real-time and do not allow time for reflection, analysis, or imagination,” she says. The upshot? Many people – particularly those who are younger – wind up not making the most of their capabilities.

      How society views technology has a great deal to do with how it forms perceptions about critical thinking. And nowhere is the conflict more apparent than at the intersection of video games and cognition. James Paul Gee, a professor of educational psychology, points out that things aren’t always as they appear. “There is a strong undercurrent of opinion that video games aren’t healthy for kids,” he says. “The reality is that they are not only a major form of entertainment, they often provide a very good tool for learning.” In fact, jigsaw tactics can go a long way toward building smarter children with better reasoning skills. Games such as SimCity extend beyond rote memorization, and teach decision-making and analytical skills in immersive, virtual environments that resemble the real world. Moreover, these games give participants freedom to explore ideas and concepts that might otherwise be inaccessible.

Question 1: In the second paragraph, it is said that information technology
A. does not help us to manage large amounts of data.
B. does not enable us to make better judgments.
C. does not improve our ability to remember details.
D. does not allow us to find solutions to problems faster.

Question 2: What does Patricia Greenfield say about the decline of literary reading?

A. It is the result of the popularity of the moving image.
B. It is unrelated to people’s ability to multi-task.
C. It has led to an increased awareness of critical thinking.
D. It has been caused by the growing tendency to read online.

Question 3: The writer uses the term ‘mushy swamp’ to convey a sense of
A. clarity.
B. reality.
C. diversity.
D. ambiguity.

Question 4: In the fourth paragraph, what point does the writer make about hyperlinks in internet texts?
A. They prevent the reader from considering other points of view.
B. They diminish the reader’s experience of engaging with the material.
C. They offer the reader an opportunity to explore subjects in greater depth.
D. They make life easier for the reader by offering instant access to information.

Question 5: Based on her research into learning and technology, Greenfield believes that visual media
A. might actually develop people’s creativity in new ways.
B. have contributed significantly to linguistic change.
C. may prevent certain users from fulfilling their potential.
D. can detract from people’s ability to relate to each other.

Question 6: In the sixth paragraph, the writer reports the view that, for young people, playing video games
A. is a means of escape from the pressures of everyday life.
B. is a highly suitable medium for intellectual development.
C. teaches effective ways of solving conflict.
D. allows enjoyment of a safe form of entertainment.

IV. Use the word given in brackets to form a word that fits in each gap (1 – 10).

Uluru – World Heritage Site

Uluru, once known as Ayers Rock, is a gigantic red rock in the ____________ (1. CENTRE) Australian desert. Approximately half a billion years old, it measures over 300 metres in ____________ (2. HIGH), making it taller than Paris's Eiffel Tower. Not only is it home to many rare animals and plants, it is also a place of huge cultural importance to the Anangu people. Among Uluru's sites with a spiritual ____________ (3. SIGNIFICANT) are caves painted with ____________ (4. ASTONISH) rock art, telling the stories that are handed down from generation to generation of the indigenous peoples. The Anangu are among the oldest societies on our planet. ____________ (5. ARCHAEOLOGY) have estimated that this area of Australia has been inhabited for over 30,000 years. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, where Uluru is situated, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987, in ____________ (6. RECOGNISE) of its outstanding natural beauty and also because of its ____________ (7. REMARK) geological formations. Seven years later, the park was given double World Heritage status because of the special ____________ (8. RELATION) the Anangu people have with the landscape around it. Only a few dozen other sites around the world have this status. Today, the authorities work ____________ (9. CLOSE) with the Anangu people, using modern techniques and traditional ____________ (10. KNOW) to protect the site, which is visited by more than a quarter of a million tourists from around the world each year.

VI. For questions 25 – 30, read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, or D) to the questions that follow. 

Young People and Technology

Danah Boyd is a specialist researcher looking at how young people use technology.

If there’s one cliche that really grates with Danah Boyd, who has made a career from studying the way younger people use the web, it’s that of the digital native. ‘There’s nothing native about young people’s engagement with technology,’ she says, adamantly. She has little time for the widely held assumption that kids are innately more adept at coping with the web or negotiating the hurdles of digital life. ‘Young people are learning about the social world around them,’ she says. ‘Today that world has computer-mediated communications. Thus, in order to learn about their social world, they’re learning about those things too. And they’re leveraging that to work out the stuff that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, etc.’

It’s no surprise she takes exception, really: as one of the first digital anthropologists to dig into the way people use social networking sites, Boyd has a track record of exposing the truths that underpin many of our assumptions about the online world. Along the way, she’s gained insights into the social web – not just by conducting studies of how many kids were using social networking sites, but by taking a closer look at what was going on.

Lately, her work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behaviour we see online, and understanding that the context of online activity is often more subtle than we first imagine. She outlined some examples at a recent conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying to a prestigious American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of gangs and violence, but the admissions officer was appalled when he discovered that the boy’s MySpace page was plastered with precisely the violent language and gang imagery he claimed to abhor. Why was he lying about his motivations, asked the university? ‘He wasn’t,’ says Boyd: in his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life.

Understanding what’s happening online is especially pertinent while discussions about race and perceptions of privacy are shifting – particularly the idea that today’s teenagers have a vastly different approach to privacy from their predecessors. Instead, Boyd says, activities that strike adults as radically new are often more easily understood from the perspective of teenagers. ‘Kids have always cared about privacy; it’s just that their notions of privacy look very different from adult notions,’ she says. ‘Kids don’t have the kind of privacy adults assume they do. Adults, by and large, think of the home as a very private space. The thing is, for young people that’s often not the case because they have little or no control over who has access to it, or under what conditions. As a result, the online world can feel more private because it feels like there’s more control.’

This concept of control is central to Boyd’s work, and it applies to not only debunking myths about teenage behaviour but also to similar ideas that have emerged about the rest of the web. Unlike some prognosticators who preach unstoppable revolution, Boyd suggests that control remains, by and large, in the same places it always did. ‘Technologists all go for the notion of “techno-utopia”,’ she says. ‘Sure, we’ve made creation and distribution more available to anyone, but at the same time, we’ve made those things irrelevant. Now commodity isn’t distribution, it’s attention – and guess what? We’re not actually democratising the whole system – we’re just shifting the way in which we discriminate.’

      It’s a call to arms that most academic researchers would tend to sidestep, but then Boyd admits to treading a fine line between academic and activist. After all, she adds, part of her purpose is to grapple with the very questions that make us feel uncomfortable. ‘Part of it is that as a researcher, everybody’s obsessed with Twitter and Facebook, and we’ve got amateur research all over the place,’ she says. ‘Plenty of scholars are jumping in and looking at very specific things. The questions I continue to want to ask are the things that are challenging to me: having to sit down and be forced to think about uncomfortable “social stuff”, and it’s really hard to get my head around it, which means it’s exactly what I should dive in and deal with.’

25. What point does Danah Boyd make about ‘computer-mediated communications’?
A. They set out to teach the young about social interaction.
B. They are an integral part of a young person’s social interaction.
C. They act as a barrier to wider social interaction amongst young people.
D. They take the place of other sorts of social interaction for young people.
26. In the second paragraph, what do we learn about Danah’s research into social networking sites?
A. It has largely sought to account for their rapid growth.
B. It has tended to question people’s attitudes towards them.
C. It has taken the form of in-depth studies into how they are designed.
D. It has begun to investigate whether they are as influential as people think.
27. What point does Danah’s example of the Los Angeles college applicant illustrate?
A. how easy it is to misinterpret an individual’s online activity
B. how readily somebody’s online activity can be investigated
C. what their online activity can tell us about a person’s sincerity
D. how important it is to check the content of someone’s online activity
28. The phrase ‘debunking myths’ refers to Danah’s view that
A. today’s teenagers are less concerned about privacy than previous generations.
B. teenagers value the idea of privacy more in a domestic environment.
C. teenagers’ attitudes to privacy are changing less than people think.
D. parents tend not to respect teenagers’ need for online privacy.
29. Danah uses the term ‘techno-utopia’ to underline her view that
A. her research has resonance for a community of web users of all ages.
B. people have unrealistic expectations about the influence of the web.
C. control of the web remains in much the same hands as before.
D. the web has a largely positive effect on many people’s lives.
30. In the last paragraph, we are given the impression that Danah
A. feels that a lot of research about the web is lacking in sufficient detail.
B. is aware that some issues in her field cannot yet be researched.
C. regards herself as being more of a philosopher than a researcher.
D. is willing to take on research challenges others typically avoid.